‘A very fortunate man’ recounts tractor accident

Dazed but still conscious, he pressed a button on his cell
phone, making the attempt to reach his son, Andy.

“I could hardly talk,” Wilcox said. “I told him I just got
hit.”

That call was the last for the phone.

“It was no good after that. It wouldn’t work at all,” Wilcox
said. “It did make that last call.”

The cell phone may have died in the Oct. 11, 2011, accident
when a vehicle struck the tractor from behind, but Wilcox was spared.

“Everybody can’t figure out how I survived,” he said. “I’m a
very fortunate man. The good Lord wasn’t ready for me to pass away.”

Wilcox and his son had been tearing out fence that Tuesday
on rented land just south of the Adams-Hancock county line. They quit just about
dusk, with Andy heading to one farm and Wilcox to another on a utility tractor,
a trip that had become routine for him over the years — until that night.

Wilcox pulled out onto Illinois 336, heading south on a flat
stretch of highway, a place where the tractor’s lights could be seen for miles.
Then another vehicle came up behind Wilcox and struck the tractor.

The impact threw him “a long ways” off the tractor and onto
the road.

“It broke my left ankle, broke a whole bunch of ribs. I had
head lacerations, a collapsed lung. They had to take my spleen out. It messed up
my shoulders real bad,” Wilcox said. “It laid me up for probably the biggest
part of six months.”

Looking at the tractor confirmed how lucky Wilcox was to be
alive.

The accident “pretty well broke the tractor in two,” he
said. “The back of the tractor and the front of the tractor were held together
with hydraulic line that hadn’t busted and electrical lines going to the back
fender.”

The only thing still working was the lights.

“There was no doubt if I had proper lighting,” Wilcox said.

Despite the seriousness of the accident and his injuries,
Wilcox said some things still worked in his favor.

Ambulance crews were meeting nearby and “got there right
away and got me down to the hospital,” he said. “They told me I was bleeding
pretty bad internally.”

Wilcox didn’t know the other vehicle was closing in fast —
and he didn’t brace himself for the impact.

If he had, “I might have been in worse shape,” Wilcox said.
“I’m lucky nobody hit me when I was crawling back to the tractor.”

The driver who hit the tractor swerved and went on around
Wilcox before stopping farther up the road.

“I must have landed to the right. I was in the right-hand
lane, which I should have been, but I can’t remember how far away I landed,” he
said.

And even though the tractor was equipped with a seat belt,
Wilcox said it’s a good thing he wasn’t wearing it.

“If I had it on, I don’t know what would have happened. This
way, it threw me completely clear of the tractor. It did break the tractor
pretty much in half and messed everything up by where I would sit,” he said.

“This would be one of the instances I guess where a seat
belt would have been a hindrance instead of a help.”

Medical care in Quincy and in Columbia, Mo., helped speed
his recovery, and so did his family. His sons managed the farm work while Wilcox
recovered, and his girlfriend, now wife, Kathy, “helped me through all this,” he
said.

By January 2012, he was back helping to check on the cattle,
and he had healed enough to plant crops last spring.

“I had operations after that to fix some problems and I
still may have some more yet to do,” he said. “I’m in pretty good shape right
now. I’ve got things that are never going to be quite right, but that’s just
part of life. I can do a lot of everything of what I used to do. You don’t
realize until something happens how fortunate you are to be able to get up and
do everything you do every day.”

Wilcox shared his story to make people more aware,
especially during spring planting. Farmers work long hours and can be out on the
road at any time of day or night with slow-moving vehicles.

“People that are on the roads really have got to be aware
that they’re in a farming community. There are guys on the road in farm
vehicles. You can come up on them so fast. You can have all the lights on and
everything, but people are just not very aware of it,” Wilcox said.

Wilcox and other farmers report drivers passing on the wrong
side of the road just to get around the farm equipment.

“If people would just slow down a little bit,” Wilcox said.
“Farmers have to use the road, too.”

Distracted driving only worsens the problem.

“Everybody on the road is talking on a cell phone or doing
multiple things while driving. We all have probably done that,” Wilcox said.
“You just need to be really careful about what’s on the road right in front of
you.”

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